Running a guild is hard work at the best of times and moving from one game to another just makes the task even harder. Hopefully this article will give guild leaders and prospective guild leaders some advice that will help make forming a guild in Guild Wars 2 a lot less stressful.

This will be a three-part series of articles, so if what you are looking for is not in this one it’ll be in the next.

Before You Form a Guild
There are whole load of things you need to consider before forming a guild, most of them totally obvious but some easily missed. Here are the sort of questions you should be looking to answer. If you are an existing clan or guild then a lot of these are likely to be in place already.

Remember, there are no right or wrong answers here, but it’s important you have consistent ones and that you communicate them to your actual and prospective members.

The Basics

Work out what sort of guild you want to be in GW2. Same as you were before or something new? Are you going to be PvP-, PvE-, or RP- focused, casual or hardcore? Remember like attracts like, so if you are a casual PvE player it’s unlikely you'll be able to recruit and keep hard core PvP'ers.

What will you call your guild? An old name or a new one? How will you decide?

What sort of guild rules will you put in place? Will it be a free for all, or will you have specific rules? Will you have an age limit?

Where will your home server be? Are you going to designate a spare one in case people can't fit on it? How will you handle things if people can't get onto the server they want to?

Prepare your forums. Maybe you want to give them a new look, new logo and then tell your new guild members about it. If you have no forum then there are several free and paid for forums you can use.

Guild Hierarchy and Permissions

Who will you make officers? Will you need custom ranks? I usually work on a one officer to ten members, and if you are multiple timezones, make sure you have at least one officer online in each one. Be sensitive to people’s feelings if you need fewer officers than you do now.

What about influence? Are you bothered about how much guild members earn? Who in your guild will be allowed to spend it?

What’s your guild bank policy? Can everyone deposit and withdraw, or only officers? Who will be in charge of keeping it tidy and sorting out what’s kept in it?

Recruitment and Guild Caps

How will you recruit people? Spam chat on your server, posts on forums or rely on friends and word of mouth?

Decide on who is coming back from other games to play and how many (see below on how the guild cap tiers work).

Ensure that you publicize your recruitment policy and how you will go about interviewing (or not) prospective members. That way everyone knows where they stand before they even apply.

What is your approach to multi-guilding? Will you insist on people staying loyal or will members be able to switch whenever? Will you limit your officers to one guild, or can they go anywhere too?

Who are you going to give priority to inviting into your guild when the game launches? Naturally your officers, but then who?

Communication is Key

Decide (if you haven’t already) on a voice com system or an out of game chat system and make sure people know how to use them. Suggest to members they set them up and test them before launch.

Who is going to pay for things like voice com servers, forums and the like? You? Will you have a donations system?

Communicate things your members are expected to do well before launch. These include such things like contributing money to raise the guild cap so their friends can join and more importantly, the server you are planning to roll on and any alternatives in case it becomes full.

Think of some events and activities you can run as a guild in the first couple of weeks and find someone to run them for you.

The Guild Cap
Initially, you or one of your guildmates will need one silver in order to create the guild. This will get you a starting member cap of 50. To increase the cap, you will need to do two things: first, find the money to pay for the next tier, and second, have enough representing members to qualify for the cap.

You can raise the guild cap by talking to a Guild Register NPC, which can be found in the each races' capital city. Make sure you have as many guild members online/representing at the time to ensure you’ll be able to meet the membership criteria.

Each tier has the following costs:

There are three main ways you can obtain the money to raise the cap:

Farm the money yourself

Buy gems and convert it to money

Ask guild members to contribute the money towards raising the cap

If you choose the last option, then it is strongly recommended that you inform your members up front and before launch so they know what to expect.

Regardless of the way you choose to start your guild, you will need to manage your guild's expectations of how and when they will be able to join. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to know how many players you’ll have coming so you know how much money you’ll need to spend at launch.

About Alliances
So far - and is looking increasingly likely - Alliance features from Guild Wars will not be available at launch. This means that if you are in a GW alliance and wish to remain in separate guilds and not merge, or are too large for the 500 cap, you will need to find and agree on other out-of-game ways of communicating with each other until such time as ArenaNet deem it necessary to add.

Since we have no confirmation of alliance chat-like features being planned, it is very important that you plan and communicate this enforced separation at launch. My suggestions include using Steam, Xfire or Mumble, as its chat overlay makes a better attempt to keep your community together. They are not ideal and have many downsides, but they are better than nothing.

Guild Structures
One of the other considerations is what sort of structure will you give your guild. Guild Wars 2 gives you the choice of a number of permissions. You want to strike the right balance between giving players too much authority or so little you end up doing everything. The permissions are:

Edit Ranks

Edit Guild Emblem

Claim/Unclaim WvW Forts

Queue Upgrades

Modify Upgrade In Progress

Activate Built Upgrades

Admin Lower Ranks

Edit Message of the Day

Display Guild Emblem

Guild Stash Deposit

Guild Stash Withdraw

Treasure Trove Deposit

Treasure Trove Withdraw

New Members Here

For example, the person you select to be able to manage your guild stash could have normal member permissions except for Guild Stash access. Only promote as many players as you need, and I would suggest leaving a gap or two for people to be promoted to once the game gets going.

Note: You must have New Members Here selected with one rank or you will not be able to invite new members to your guild.

Dealing with Servers and Regions
Perhaps one area where there has been the most confusion is in the matter of servers. Many players have concerns over the effect on them if they cannot roll on the same server as their guilds or friends. Here are the effects you'll come across if you do not manage to roll on your guilds chosen server.

You will be able to join your guild if you are in a different region or on a different server by using the guesting mechanic.

You will be able to PvE (guesting) and sPvP together, no matter what server you roll on, as long as your servers are in the same region (US & US/EU & EU).

Guild chat and mail all work even if you are on a different server.

You will be able to play with EU players if you live in the US (and vice versa).

You will not be able to WvW with your guild if you are on a different server.

You may of course pay to change servers, but only after 7 days have passed. The fees for this vary by server population:

1800 gems to transfer to a high population world

1000 gems to transfer to a medium population world

500 gems to transfer to a low population world

"I’m worried about how good or nice my server will be."
The short answer is, no one can answer that for you. Many guilds have not decided or announced what servers they will be rolling on and even fewer have posted that information.

The best advice I can give, is try to ensure guilds you know and like can agree on a server to go to, so no matter what the community is like on that server you will always have nice players to play with. It's also important to realise there will be no such thing as a perfect server.

The other question to ask yourself is does having all languages bundled onto the same server bother you. If so it’s probably best to make sure you roll on a server whose language and culture you will be familiar with. Currently there are only two separated language servers, French and German.

In general...
We don't have firm answers on some of the details of what exactly you can and cannot do, but it’s safe to say that unless you choose to spend all your time in WvW, having to roll on a different server is not the same disaster it would be in other MMO’s. Therefore, when you are planning your guild, try to give priority for those who will live and breathe WvW.

The Knowledge Gap
A lot of the game mechanics will be unknown to you and your members, therefore it’s worth reading up on as many as you can beforehand (especially around the guild functions such as representation, influence and multi-guilding).

Summary
Planning a guild is hard work. There are a lot of things to consider and yet it’s an essential step to ensure that you and your guild get the most out of the first few days. It's tempting to think, "I'll just do it on the day," but this will leave you open to needless drama and will reduce you and your guilds fun at launch.

In subsequent articles we’ll be looking at things to consider when running your guild and a detailed breakdown of the guild influence system, which will help you plan the best way to get the most out of your guild’s efforts in the shortest time.

Comments

How much influence does your guild need to have in order to buy a guild bank? Also, are there upgrades for a guild bank, like you can upgrade it to give you more item slots and stuff or do you just get the guild bank and thats it?

Youre right, the server stuff is confusing... I'm sorry, but could someone explain this, step by step? I checked the Wiki, checked the "logins tied to region" topic, but I'm still confused. Pretty sorry, if it's a dumb question.

So I don't get it[list]
[*]
[list]
[*]You will be able to PvE (guesting) and sPvP together, no matter what server you roll on, as long as your servers are in the same region (US & US/EU & EU)
[*]You will be able to play with EU players if you live in the US (and vice versa).
[/list]
[/list]
First bullet suggests that in order to play together with my American friends (I'm European) I have to roll a toon on a server belonging to the the same region his server belongs to.

Second bullet suggests I'm free to play with my American friends even though I'm European... just like that?

I read the blog post about the servers, but it's still unclear for me. If I buy the game in Europe, I'm forced to choose a home server located in Europe, right? What then, if I want to play with my American friends, do I have to get invited by him (guesting feature) or vice versa? That seems to contradict the first bullet, stressing out we both need to have our chars on servers belonging to the same region....

[quote name='paladyn999' timestamp='1343600973' post='1652074']
Youre right, the server stuff is confusing... I'm sorry, but could someone explain this, step by step? I checked the Wiki, checked the "logins tied to region" topic, but I'm still confused. Pretty sorry, if it's a dumb question.

So I don't get it[list]
[*]
[list]
[*]You will be able to PvE (guesting) and sPvP together, no matter what server you roll on, as long as your servers are in the same region (US & US/EU & EU)
[*]You will be able to play with EU players if you live in the US (and vice versa).
[/list]
[/list]
First bullet suggests that in order to play together with my American friends (I'm European) I have to roll a toon on a server belonging to the the same region his server belongs to.

Second bullet suggests I'm free to play with my American friends even though I'm European... just like that?

I read the blog post about the servers, but it's still unclear for me. If I buy the game in Europe, I'm forced to choose a home server located in Europe, right? What then, if I want to play with my American friends, do I have to get invited by him (guesting feature) or vice versa? That seems to contradict the first bullet, stressing out we both need to have our chars on servers belonging to the same region....

Sorry, I'm feeling dumb..........

PS Quoting sucks..
[/quote]

To be able to play with your friends every single day in PvE, PvP, WvW with ease, without any sort of guesting or inviting -- you ideally should be on the same server.
If you cannot be on the same server as the rest of your guildies and friends, due to lag, free space on the server, or some other reason - then a guildie or friend must guest invite you to the server that they are on. While we don't know alot about the process yet, the only thing it will affect is WvW play. We have people located in the EU playing on American servers and people in America playing on the Euro servers.

If you buy the game in Europe you may choose to play on [i]any server [/i]- American or European. The region lock on the game[i] only [/i]affects what country you may play [i]from[/i], not the [i]server you choose[/i]. For instance, if you took your laptop with your EU copy of the game to the US on a trip, you would not be able to play, until you got [i]home[/i]. Otherwise, this has no effect on what server you may choose when you first create a character at launch.

You can be a part of a guild that is on a different server than you, or choose to be on the same server it's on. The only thing a different server will affect is you playing WvW.

But just to confirm something:

[quote]You will be able to PvE (guesting) and sPvP together, no matter what server you roll on, as long as your servers are in the same region (US & US/EU & EU).[/quote]

Since the guesting mechanic hasn't been tested, or even described in a cohesive way.. can you confirm this statement with something from Anet specifically? If a person on a US server can join a guild that was largely on a EU server, then it would stand to reason that a person from the EU server could guest an American friend on the US server. I have not yet seen anything stating both parties had to be on the same [i]regional/nationality[/i] server (not location name). Because right now as far as we understood it to be:

''With guesting, your characters can play on [b]any world where you have friends[/b]—with certain restrictions. For instance, you will not be able to participate in WvW while guesting." [url="http://www.arena.net/blog/choosing-and-transferring-worlds-in-guild-wars-2"]http://www.arena.net/blog/choosing-and-transferring-worlds-in-guild-wars-2[/url]

[quote][b][size=5]About Alliances[/size][/b]
So far - and is looking increasingly likely - Alliance features from [i]Guild Wars[/i] will [b]not[/b] be available at launch.[/quote]Oh Snap, let the QQ'n begin. I for one am completely for this, but I know a large number of people will not be happy

I greatly appreciate you taking the time and effort to pull this information together and present to us in the way that you have. I've already had a few ask the merits of this information and whether the information was either reviewed, validated, or approved by someone in ArenaNet before the post went live. I'm sure you probably have sources you pulled from - is there a way to reference perhaps the core sources of information? Again - this is awesome. Someone had to do it, glad it was you! (for we both know what trouble I can get into when I try, lol). Cheers, Mark

For clarity, the in game region restriction currently only relates to SPvP I.e if you are on an Eu server you currently wont be able to SPvP with people who have rolled on US servers. The last information we were given was that SPvP was limited to servers in your region.

For PvE you can guest anywhere in the world.

We have not seen the guesting system in any detail, but the above information was gleaned when the guest system was switched on for a while in BWE1.

As mentioned in the article there are many things (like server numbers, guesting and the actual numbers of guild members you need to upgrade) we don't know and are subject to change. But I hope this article is of great use in people's guild planning

For clarity, the in game region restriction currently only relates to SPvP I.e if you are on an Eu server you currently wont be able to SPvP with people who have rolled on US servers. The last information we were given was that SPvP was limited to servers in your region.

For PvE you can guest anywhere in the world.

We have not seen the guesting system in any detail, but the above information was gleaned when the guest system was switched on for a while in BWE1.

As mentioned in the article there are many things (like server numbers, guesting and the actual numbers of guild members you need to upgrade) we don't know and are subject to change. But I hope this article is of great use in people's guild planning, as time is now very short to get this done.

Question:
Are still able to join multiple guilds? (Keeping the 'representing' option making sense)
And if so, how does guild chat work then? Are you only able to chat with your current representing guild, and if so, how will you be able to represent a guild on an other server if representing is (afaik) mainly used in WvW, which you can't do while being in a guild that's on a different server?

[quote name='Ruttor' timestamp='1343629245' post='1653181']
Question:
Are still able to join multiple guilds? (Keeping the 'representing' option making sense)
And if so, how does guild chat work then? Are you only able to chat with your current representing guild, and if so, how will you be able to represent a guild on an other server if representing is (afaik) mainly used in WvW, which you can't do while being in a guild that's on a different server?
[/quote]

Yes you can still join multiple guilds, I personally did this every single BWE.

I did not personally test this, but I'm pretty sure your guild chat is with the guild you're currently representing.

You can represent a guild whose leader is on another server. From my experience, the influence seems to be separated by server e.g. if you have 10 people in server A earning 1000 influence, and 5 people in server B earning 500 influence, then your guild does not have 1500 influence they can use, but rather, 1000 influence to be used by the members in server A and 500 by the members in server B. I'm not sure about the upgrades though, they may be cross server, they may not. I would assume they're not since I believe some relates to WvWvW.

Not sure about this one at all, but since claiming keeps seems to be determined by:

1. Your rank having the authority to claim keeps
2. Having the most people participating in taking a keep

I would assume that you can actually claim a keep even if your leader is on another server and your guild was originally from that other server.

[quote name='DJSkittles1' timestamp='1343629074' post='1653173']
How long does it take one person to get 1000 influence?
[/quote]

I was able to earn almost 500 influence over 2 BWEs and for each BWE I only played 2 out of the 2.5/3 days the BWE is open for. So I would assume in about 2 weeks playing completely solo, you should be able to get that.

[quote name='Krino' timestamp='1343608939' post='1652428']
i wish i could join a competitive all around guild, too bad NoTeamSpeak = NoGuild. T.T
[/quote]
you can join us! No TS no prob.

One Quick Question on the article though. You said it was one Silver piece to make a guild. In BWE3 I SWEAR it was one gold piece which = about 350 gems which = about S4.25 American. I hope they offer a Black lion Trading post option to buy a Celestial Sigil like thing to lower the cost to around 100 Gems. If they are trying to make a social engine out of this game (which they are) guilds should be cheap and ready to go in the first minutes. IF I have to grind to get my guild name and network...it is a fail.

One Quick Question on the article though. You said it was one Silver piece to make a guild. In BWE3 I SWEAR it was one gold piece which = about 350 gems which = about S4.25 American. I hope they offer a Black lion Trading post option to buy a Celestial Sigil like thing to lower the cost to around 100 Gems. If they are trying to make a social engine out of this game (which they are) guilds should be cheap and ready to go in the first minutes. IF I have to grind to get my guild name and network...it is a fail.
[/quote]

The figures quoted above came from an Arenanet dev on the official forums, so it was one silver to start a guild. The farming to get enough money to invite members issue is why you should consider the ways in which you will handle it prior to launch.

"[color=#282828][font=tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif][size=3]You will be able to PvE (guesting) and sPvP together, no matter what server you roll on, as long as your servers are in the same region (US & US/EU & EU)."[/size][/font][/color]

Desperately needs a source, as I have a guildie purposely rolling across the pond, due to us never hearing this anywhere. She did so in a BWE, and I guilded her. Obviously she couldn't guest in beta.

I'm an opinionated son of a gun! Feel free to visit my blog, "Tales from the Void: Adventures in gaming whilst siezing Saidin"http://omedon.tumblr.com/

[quote name='vandyl' timestamp='1343634175' post='1653310']
Having infuence separated by server means you really need all your guild on one server. Then all members benefit from upgrades. I read everywhere that the ONLY downside is WvW. Misinformation imo.
[/quote]

Wait, whoa, what? Where did that "influence per server" come from?

I'm an opinionated son of a gun! Feel free to visit my blog, "Tales from the Void: Adventures in gaming whilst siezing Saidin"http://omedon.tumblr.com/

[quote name='Omedon' timestamp='1343633789' post='1653300']
Have to second that:

"[color=#282828][font=tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif][size=3]You will be able to PvE (guesting) and sPvP together, no matter what server you roll on, as long as your servers are in the same region (US &amp; US/EU &amp; EU)."[/size][/font][/color]

Desperately needs a source, as I have a guildie purposely rolling across the pond, due to us never hearing this anywhere. She did so in a BWE, and I guilded her. Obviously she couldn't guest in beta.
[/quote]

It comes from reports of players who tried it. Also it was noticed that tournaments were not multi-region so while it's not been directly confirmed by Anet(they haven't confirmed much about guilds IMHO) putting the two facts together would seem to lead to this conclusion.

I suspect the influence systems limitations and the SPvP ones tie in with the guesting system, but, pending more information from Anet on these matters I can only state what has been observed in game. I also felt it was important to at least help people plan their guild now, rather than leave people to do it all on launch day.

There are a couple more articles to come, so stuff like influence and how guesting will work will be in those in more detail.